In the fourth course of the Content Strategy Specialization - Ensuring Your Content's Impact - you will look at visual communication and the ways you can be more effective with your font choices, photography, and video. You'll also dive deeper into social communities to help you understand how these communities form and what you can do to build your role within them. The last module is pivotal for Content Strategists. It will help you to understand how best to measure your content to maximize its effectiveness relative to the time you commit to it.
While this MOOC does share the theoretical elements of Content Strategy, there is a much greater emphasis on its application. Creating trend-worthy headlines and blogs, social media plans, digital measurement templates, video and photography content are all skills you will have in your toolkit by the end of the MOOC, ready to apply at your organization. And speaking of toolkits, we have included one that you can download and take back to work which includes the practical tips from the learnings in this course as well as the previous one on Expanding Your Content's Reach.
Guest lecturers in this course include:
-- Zach Wise, Associate Professor, Medill Northwestern
-- Rich Gordon, Professor & Director of Digital Innovation, Medill, Northwestern
-- Randy Hlavac, Lecturer, Medill, Northwestern (and lead professor of the Social Media Marketing Specialization also on Coursera)

Taught By

Candy Lee

John Lavine

Randy Hlavac

Transcript

[MUSIC] Zach, I really have been carried along by it so far. But I have an underlying question or maybe an over arching question. Those of you who are experts in the visual world go much deeper with what's going on in the audience's brain It's a reach for some of us but if we're going to be content strategist and be in the visual world, we really have to go deeper. And work our way through what are the principles. What are drivers? What's happening in the audience's brain? Take us there. >> The brain has a unique ability to recognize forms. It's the essential part of how we see. To understand how to communicate clearly, Gestalt Psychology helps us understand how we see forms. Gestalt Psychology can be summed up in actually sort of a single quote, "The whole is different from the sum of its parts." This is a quote that's probably familiar to a lot of you. It's from Max Wertheimer. He's a psychologist and one of the three founders of Gestalt Psychology. This is an illustration of the concept of totality, which summarizes Gestalt theory pretty well. You grasp the totality of something before you worry about the details. And in this case, we don't worry about all the little black pieces, all those little dots everywhere. We don't worry about those details. What we worry about is the totality. And so when we look at an image like this, what we tend to see is an image of a dog with a tree in the background with a shadow. And this actually explains a lot about how we see. >> So Zach, that's really interesting, tell us more about. >> Well, understanding gestalt is important for all aspects of visual communication. The way that we see and perceive the images we see is largely the same regardless of the mediated format. Regardless if its video, or photo or design. And there are some principles that will help guide us as to what works well, what doesn't work well and these apply to all media formats. According to Gestalt theory, there are some principles that we can follow. We have figure grounds, similarity, closure, proximity, symmetry, continuation and common fate. I'm going to walk you through what these are and what they mean for us. So we'll start off with figure/grounds. So figure/ground is basically the idea of what you're looking at and focusing on versus what is the background. What is important versus what's context. And if we think about this in evolutionary terms, we can think about. Are you going to step on a snake, or is that ground you're about to step on. So clearly, the snake is the figure, and it's what you need to focus on, and it needs to be distinguished from the background. It's a very inherent part of how we see. When we think about how that applies in something like design, let's take a look at this go to China screenshot that we have here. And GOTOCHINA is very clearly the figure. It's clearly distinguished from the background. The background gives context to the message in this case. Take a moment and take a look at this image and see if you can figure out what's the figure's the image and what's the ground in this image. So let's think about user interfaces and the way that people interact with designs. Figure/ground relationships are really important here. Here we have two examples of the same navigation. One is more successful than the other because of the figure/ground relationship. The one of the left is more effective because it clearly distinguishes what is figure from the ground. What is clearly the text and what is the point of the button versus the background of the button. The one on the right, you can get confused between what is figure and what is ground because the outline has the same weight and intensity as the actual words. And while we're talking about user interfaces, let's take a look at two examples of a Send button. One is more effective than the other because it has a drop shadow on it which Gives the illusion of elevating it off the page, making it a figure versus background. If we take a look at Apple's communication on their website selling the iPad. Here we have something that distinguishes iPad and iPad mini from the background, subtle points that they're trying to make about the iPad By the use of both the white background which distinguish it from the gray. But also the subtle use of drop shadow right below the segment of the screen that has iPad and iPad mini. And that's figure grounds. The next principle I want to talk about is similarity. And it is the idea that Things group together when they're similar to one another. So here let's take a look at all these yellow dots. Now there's nothing that's sort of grouping some dots from other dots right now. But if we change the color of some of them now we have distinct groups. So we that there's a blue group, a red group, a purple group And if you look at it from far enough back you sort of see that all the yellow can sort of group together. And this works regardless of orientation. And moving on, we can make it even clearer by sort of making all these similar elements anchored to one side versus the other. That will get into another principle that we're going to talk about here in just a little bit. So let's take a look at what Similarity looks like in the real world. Let's take a look at an example from a newspaper. Here in this example there's nothing that really groups together except a bunch of text on a page. And so all that text groups together and then we have Daily Globe on the top. And so those are two distinct groups. But nothing that really helps you visually consume the content on this page. Let's take a look at a more modern, successful example. 37 Signals. So, in this example, we have similarity groupings that work much more successfully. We have their products, basecamp A campfire. All of these things sort of group together because they have similar iconic treatments, that sort of rounded edge to them. They have similar backgrounds. And even the messages with the words that they're trying to say, those group together and form distinct groups that are similarly formatted down throughout the page. Let's take another look at another website, UX Magazine. And in this example we have all these headlines are all treated similarly to one another. So they sort of group together. What it allows the designer to do is to distinguish featured content from the rest of the content down there. So there's a clear distinction between that Headline feature piece and the rest of it. But that raw similarity also applies to how we interact with it. We can take a look at once your mouse rolls over this content, it turns red and gets a red box around it. So the user would expect a similar thing to happen if they roll over similar content. So that consistency becomes really important in successful design. [MUSIC]

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